The national rates of recidivism for minors who’ve been incarcerated is somewhere between 50 and 70 percent. But DC’s innovative Youth Court, for first-time and nonviolent offenders, boasts a recidivism rate of just 11 percent, with nearly nine out of 10 kids who’ve passed through the program going on to graduate high school.

This is your War on Drugs: a 19-year-old is pulled over by Denver police for making an illegal left turn and ends up being beaten to a pulp.

“In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George Washington, 52, was nearly toothless. So he hired a dentist to transplant nine teeth into his jaw–having extracted them from the mouths of his slaves.” [here, via]

The Ivory Coast thing is just heart-wrenching… I mean, back when things were bad, they were REALLY bad REALLY fast (with a little genocide too in Abidjan if I recall). Lets hope Gbagbo leaves, because if he does not its gonna be a big civil war and Ghana and Nigeria are going to vie for control of the region (which they are already doing).

And to think, when I was a young lad, Ivory Coast was the second best country in West Africa (after Ghana).